I first wrote this blog entry in 2006 after reading an amazing book
called "A Plague Upon Humanity"
by Daniel Barenblatt. It tells the story of the hidden history of
Japan's biological warfare program before and during WW II. Since we
are remembering the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week I
thought we also should remember the origins of another weapon of mass
destruction - biological weapons.

Barenblatt
begins by revealing how Japan created a phony pretext in order to start
the Manchurian war. In September 1931 Japanese army engineers secretly
blew up the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway near Shenyang. The
Japanese government then immediately blamed the explosion upon Chinese
soldiers garrisoned nearby. Japan then attacked the Chinese troops,
sleeping in their barracks at the time. A war was underway.

Early
on Japan set up a biological warfare (BW) unit led by Shiro Ishii. BW
units were established throughout Manchuria and China in Japanese army
occupied territory. At these locations Chinese freedom fighters and
civilians were used as lab rats and were given lethal doses of bubonic
plague, cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid. Bodies of infected
prisoners were cut open, often while people still lived, to study the
effects of the biological contamination. Japan's BW program used
infected rats and fleas, dropped from airplanes, to spread the deadly
diseases killing entire Chinese villages. Hundreds of thousands of
innocent Chinese civilians were killed by Japan.

As WW II widened
throughout the Pacific, Japan took their BW campaign to Japanese
occupied islands. Japan also sent disease laden animals into Russia in
hopes of spreading disease into that country. American prisoners of war
were experimented on in Japanese labs as well.

Following
Japanese surrender at the end of WW II one would have thought that these
crimes against humanity would have been exposed and punished, similar
to Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. But this was not the case.
General Douglas MacArthur made a deal with Japan's chief BW expert,
Shiro Ishii, protecting him from prosecution by literally covering up
the entire BW story. Ishii and his BW team gave their expertise to the
U.S. According to Barenblatt, "Not only did they escape war crimes
proceedings and public scrutiny by virtue of their cooperation with the
U.S. occupation authorities, they also became prominent public health
officials and respected academic figures in Japanese university and
government circles. A few became quite wealthy as executives of
pharmaceutical companies."

The Soviet Union knew about Japan's BW
program and in late 1949 called for Ishii to be apprehended and tried
by the U.S. occupation forces in Japan as the ringleader of the secret
Japanese program. In response, Gen. MacArthur's office in Tokyo
denounced the Soviet charges of Japanese biological warfare and a U.S.
cover-up as evidence of communist propaganda.

In fact on March
13, 1948 the U.S. War Department cabled instructions to Gen. MacArthur
in Japan to give "immunity" to Japanese BW operatives. "Information
retained from Ishii and associates may be retained in intelligence
channels," the instructions concluded.

There were war crimes
trials in Japan after WW II. B.V.A. Roling, the last surviving judge
from the Tokyo trials, who represented the Netherlands on the
international tribunal, learned of this American deception many years
later. "As one of the judges in the International Military Tribunal for
the Far East, it is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that
centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind
was kept secret from the Court by the U.S. government," Roling wrote.
The U.S. should be "ashamed because of the fact they withheld
information from the Court with respect to the biological experiments of
the Japanese in Manchuria on Chinese and American prisoners of war," he
said.

In the 1950's Ishii was secretly taken to the U.S. to
lecture at Fort Detrick, MD on how to best conduct germ warfare. And as
the Korean War heated up, Ishii was used by the U.S. to advise on how
to spread deadly disease in that war against North Korean and Chinese
forces. North Korea, China and the Soviet Union all claimed in 1951-52
that the U.S. Pentagon was using germ warfare on a large scale in the
Korean War.

The Chinese showed footage and photographs of
metallic U.S. shells that snapped open upon hitting the ground,
releasing a swarming cargo of insects that unleashed bubonic plague,
smallpox, and anthrax. This method of delivery had been a favorite of
Japan's BW program.

Barenblatt notes that an international
scientific investigating team, headed by a highly noted British
biochemist from Cambridge University, did research in Korea and issued a
report saying that sudden appearances of insects and spiders, of
species not normally known in the region, in winter, and in association
with the dropping of strange containers and objects by U.S. military
planes were evidence of bio-warfare. Lab tests performed on fleas
discovered in such unusual circumstances, positively showed the presence
of bubonic plague bacteria.

In some cases, U.S. military jets,
usually F-86 fighters, had flown over Korea dropping masses of fowl
feathers tainted with anthrax.

In 1956 American journalist John
Powell was charged with 13 counts of sedition for trying to expose the
U.S. BW campaign in Korea. In 1953 former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
brought Powell before congressional committees charging him with
"un-American activities." Years later, in the 1980's, Powell's story
was finally aired in an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

So
as we today hear China warning about the re-arming of Japan, with full
support and encouragement of the U.S., can we not see some historical
precedent for their worry? Both Japan and the U.S. have shown, since WW
II, that they will use extreme measures to subdue Korea and China in
the quest for control and domination of the Asia-Pacific. As the U.S.
today doubles its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, can
there be any doubt that China and Korea have not forgotten the stories
of the past? Stories that to most Americans are unknown and long
covered up.

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http://space4peace.blogspot.com/

Bruce Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.